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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

Spent last week in Phoenix, rode Waymo a dozen times. Autonomous taxis are the future. Don't have to tip, don't have to worry about pissing off the driver if I'm only going a few blocks. Price is reasonable, seems less than Uber or a standard taxi.

Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.

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I don't like the wait time though. I don't want to wait 5 minutes for my Waymo to arrive for a 10 minute trip down to the grocery store when I can wait 0 minutes and hop in my own car and just drive there myself.

I do like autonomous cars though, but they won't completely remove car ownership.

It costs something like $10k-$12k per year to own a car in the US. That's a lot of robotaxi rides. But I can't imagine self-driven cars disappearing either, though I can imagine them being banned in city centers within a decade.

It doesn't cost anywhere close to that unless you are driving an absolutely insane amount of miles or have some ridiculous supercar where the insurance rates are insane.

Honestly it does not sound that far from reality.

I guess the parent is referencing this kind of study:

> The overall average cost to own and operate a new car in 2025 is $11,577 (decrease of $719 from 2024).

https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UPDATE-A...

I guess we were thinking of different numbers. That's including depreciation, interest and sales tax, which I would consider purchase cost, not part of the cost to own. But

Makes total sense to include depreciation and finance if you're making a like-for-like comparison with robotaxis.

By self-driven cars you mean, a human self? By context I think you do but self-driven is maybe a strange phrase to use to differentiate from self-driving.

agreed. they'll make the most sense in dense cities like NYC where having a car is more inconvenient because you have to worry about parking.

You can still tip the shareholders. Like DoorDash did until it got caught.

Or Like Dave App or Chime.

Fun fact about Dave App's tipping. If you bring the value to zero you saw an animation of a kid's food being taken away from them.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/11/...

Wow, that FTC case gets worse and worse the farther into it you read. What a scumbag company. It's like they opened the "Dark Patterns Unleashed" book and followed every example.

How can I know my tip actually goes to the shareholders and isn't squandered by executives?

"don't have to tip" is a completely separate and solvable issue without autonomous vehicles.

It isn't when it is cultural. There is nothing forcing people to tip, except not wanting to feel shame or be shamed by others. For example, while out on a date.

Or being harassed by waiters and waitresses. It's rare but happened to me twice!

Something's wrong with the city if you have to take a taxi just to go a few blocks.

Better question is why people are blind to their local bus offerings. I find them highly convenient.

A lot of bus routes suck and people don't like to plan ahead for how they'll get someplace, so they often default to the most general transportation available (personal vehicles) if the transit network isn't good enough for everyday tasks.

As an example, my wife's 15m car commute would take 45m by bus transfer to the nearest stop, which is a couple miles from the destination on a freeway onramp. The transit system is fixing it, but that date is 3 years away. That's still better than the routes some people have.

And lest you think the local transit agency sucks (by American standards), they don't. They just prioritize office workers heading to/from downtown instead of people moving radially through the metro area.

I know a lot of people who live by like 10 min frequency routes or better and usually its me revealing their existence to them when I use it to show up to their house. Could it work for all trips? Of course not. But plenty could be done on busses as it is. People are blind to them though. No one bothers to look at transit system maps. They see the couple rail lines listed on google maps and assume there is no other transit offering.

I had to carry a couple of gallons of dairy for a trade show. Too heavy for the 15 minute walk. First world problem, I suppose, but Waymo was a convenient point-to-piont option.

Yes, Phoenix is a monument to mankind's ignorance. No one should live in a place where temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees.

Americans scraping the bottom of the barrel to avoid investing in public transport.

The suburban landscape will take time to densify.

In the mean time Waymo integrated with transit (timed transfers and unified payments) would make using the existing rail lines more appealing.

in some towns (like SF) folks have used Waymo thousands of times - its everywhere, for a good reason - while its not always faster, it's more consistent, pleasant and safe.

> The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows. Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.

Or go from being an N car household to an N-1 car household.

> Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.

Not any time soon. There are WAY too many edge cases that autonomous vehicles are just scratching the surface on.

> Price is reasonable, seems less than Uber or a standard taxi.

> Me, in 2015: [Uber's price] is reasonable, seems less than a standard taxi.

We already know how this story progresses.

We have two cars. With Waymo we would go to only owning one.

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